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The
discovery only last week of what are believed to be
the remains of Jean McConville, the Belfast widowed
mother of ten shot dead and secretly buried by the
IRA 31 years ago, has yet again highlighted a particularly
sordid dimension to what in the eyes of many Provisional
republicans was an otherwise just if brutal war. For
no matter how murderously vile our opponents it is
crass doublethink, as Kathleen and Bill Christison
wrote in Counterpunch, ‘to see the actions of
one murderous army justified by invoking the murderous
tactics of another.’
Secret
graves have long been the universal calling card of
war criminals. Too numerous to mention in total they
include in their number, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein,
Roberto D’Aubisson, Roberto Viola and Augusto
Pinochet. When such places of denial - resting place
is too incongruous to be of any serious descriptive
value - are mentioned a dreadful image sears into
the consciousness – that of ‘Einsatzgruppen
A’ commandant Franz Walther Stahlecker standing
haughty and imperious, gazing across his corpse laden
pits on Germany’s Eastern front. There are fewer
examples of power more corrupt or malign than the
war criminal mercilessly lording it over his powerless
victims at their discretely prepared graveside where
no markings were ever intended to record a trace of
their presence. At that juncture the power disparity
is as consummate as it is obliterating.
While
we republicans, armed with our sense of legitimacy
and moral superiority, may balk at it, the phenomenon
of the disappeared is on a par with the war crimes
of loyalism such as those inflicted by the Shankill
butchers, and that of the British state when it perpetrated
mass slaughter on an unarmed civilian population in
Derry a matter of months before Jean McConville met
her fate. Republicans have scripted themselves as
the victims of brutal repression who reluctantly responded
with what Ted Honderich once termed a form of ‘democratic
violence’ aimed at redressing the democratic
deficit. Nowhere in the script was it outlined that
we would transgress the boundaries of our role and
become the practitioners of war crimes ouselves. Consequently,
for republicanism, the disappeared sweeps the feet
from under its perspective of victimhood. A people
who sees itself as oppressed and resorting to armed
resistance as a matter of right, when forthrightly
confronted with the hideous aberration of the unmarked
grave, is left uncomfortable as its narrative is unpicked
and ruptured. The experience of the Chilean writer
Ariel Dorfmann is most instructive: ‘I have felt
the surge of self-righteousness that comes from being
unfairly hurt. Anything we do, justified. Any criticism
against us, dismissed.’
Because
if we republicans are genuine about confronting injustice,
subverting hierarchies of victims and defending the
rights of those most vulnerable to infringement in
our inegalitarian society, then there is a need to
avoid the knee jerk response that seeks solace and
refuge in the unpersuasive defence of ‘securocrats
trying to undermine the peace process.’ Raw and
rough reciprocity alone has the stinging power to
cleanse the wounds that will eventually allow the
ragged edges to knit together, even in spite of themselves,
and close over.
The
chief of staff of the Argentinean Army, Martin Balso,
when confronted with the horrors inflicted by the
forces he came to command in the aftermath of their
atrocities advocated ‘initiating a painful dialogue
about the past that was never sustained and which
acts like a ghost within the collective consciousness
of the country, always returning from the shadows
from where it occasionally hides.’ If such a
dialogue is to gain momentum here then it must be
freed from the shackles of the peace process where
truth has no substance, being a mere stratagem specifically
employed by all for narrow political advantage through
flagging up only the ‘truth’ about the ‘other
side.’
Unionist
and Fine Gael politicians have already bolted out
of the traps with a gusto demanding a public inquiry
into the disappeared. The target of their wrath is
the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. One suspects
had he been a brigadier in the British Army going
by the name Gordon Kerr, caviar parties rather than
public inquiries would be more the fashion. Evidence
if any were needed that their eagerness to get to
the finishing line with a preordained conclusion contrasts
vividly with their tardiness to even approach the
starting line when the spotlight begins to fall on
the atrocities of their allies.
Nevertheless,
the British, unionists and their fellow travellers
are emerging with one clear advantage in this morbid
dance for the moral high ground that lies at the end
of this horrific saga. They can argue with some substance
- even if we suspect much sleight of hand at play
- that the past is the past and that they are prepared
to draw a line under it. The disappearance of Armagh
man Gareth O’ Connor, now widely believed to
be a victim of Provisional republicans, means that
any mea culpa on our part will be seen as a cynical
exercise in one-upmanship, lending to our demands
for truth the appearance of seeking to avoid it at
all costs and being interested instead solely in inflicting
our version of the truth on the rest of society. Are
republicans to hide forever in the intellectual and
ethical swamp that the establishment has so obligingly
carved out for us as some sort of peace process theme
park whose hall of mirrors allows us to fumble along
anesthetized by distortion? Ourselves alone are fooled.
Even Argentinean generals are going to leave us looking
less contrite then they.
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